Beckett's Three Critiques: Kant's Bathos and the Irish Chandos

My ambitious title cannot hope to fulfill its promise, and thus risks becoming bathetic—hence my cryptic subtitle. However, my goal will be reached if I manage to provide a schema, put forward some questions, and perhaps reopen the debate about the links between Beckett and philosophy. One way to begin is to notice the ambiguity of the title of this special issue: Out of the Archive, which calls up two different meanings: "What can we get out of the archives that we didn't know before?" and "How quickly can we flee the archives?" Is a "scientific" approach to Beckett's texts one that is solidly established in archival research, or should we take our bearings in pre-publication documents, however illegible or incomplete, and then move on, out of the archives, back to the texts themselves? As legitimate as these questions are, they also sound familiar. It could be that, some thirty years later, Beckett scholarship is repeating debates about archives and "genetic criticism" that raged through the Joyce industry during the 1980s, when Hans Walter Gabler and John Kidd fought over the "corrected" and revised text of Ulysses. It has subsided since, and as Dirk Van Hulle has noted, there is a huge difference between Joyce's "Know-How" and Beckett's "Nohow."¹

Two recent books, Michael Groden's Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual and Personal Views and Daniel Ferrer's Logiques du Brouillon, revisit the Gabler wars so as to move beyond personal quarrels and methodological conflicts towards a more general context.² Here Ferrer addresses broader theoretical issues by surveying a broad field of genetic "avant-textes." Indeed, his observations are not limited to texts: he analyzes in detail Delacroix's fruitful hesitations over an historical painting. Ferrer concludes with a meditation on the theory of possible worlds, claiming that it might offer an overarching logic for the role of pre-publication documents in literary criticism. This approach has the potential to reconfigure the relationship between aesthetics, textual criticism, and narratology. As the head of the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes in Paris, Ferrer has been immersed in discussions of the genetic aspect of archives for more than thirty years. In France and Germany genetic scholars have studied authors ranging from Zola to Perec, from Hölderlin to Valéry. But in English-speaking countries, this type of investigation has been limited to canonical modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Pound. Jerome McGann's exciting forays into the archives of Victorian authors make him a rare exception. Ferrer's method involves generalizing from the salient features of several corpuses in an effort to reach universal models capable of making sense of the chaotic jumble of drafts, notes, schemes, plans, and first-draft versions usually studied by textual geneticists. Ultimately, he engages in productive dialogues with Nelson Goodman, Michael Riffaterre, and Umberto Eco.

Ferrer is typical of the generation to which I belong, a generation that has shifted over time from pure, capital-T Theory—a field defined by Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Cixous, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lacan—to more pragmatic concerns associated with textual studies. Genetic studies will always be bound to the reality of a material archive, which may offer a cornucopia, or the scant remainders of an activity that has been all but obliterated.

To give an example of my own evolution, I'll present a vignette that doubles as a self-critique: I will confess to a blunder I made about Beckett at the beginning of the 1980s. Having worked on Joyce and Pound from the genetic angle, but not knowing much about Beckett, I was invited to join a group investigating Murphy at the instigation of Jacques Aubert. My task was to focus on the references to psychology and psychologists that abound in the novel. Spending a week in the British Museum, I took out all the books on psychology that were available to Beckett in the early 1930s. I knew that just as he was beginning his psychoanalysis with Bion in the Winter of 1933-34, Beckett was reading these books to...